The Ballad of Tom Dooley (12 page)

Captain Allison is an able fellow, and I’m sure he could have handled this case without having an out-of-work ex-governor underfoot, but he was gracious in receiving me, and kind enough to brief me in the facts of the case, before I went off to interview the client, to determine the situation for myself.

The prisoner has spent some three months in the Wilkes County jail, a solid two-story red brick building, sparse of windows, as befits a place that detains murderers. It sits behind the white-columned brick courthouse, like a ruddy calf in the lee of its stalwart mother, but it is a pleasant prospect for a prison, with shade trees softening the aspect of the structures, and a distant line of hills framing the valley now in autumn tints of gold and scarlet.

I was raised in just such a village, in the towering blue mountains that lie between Asheville and the border of Tennessee, and I missed those sheltering hills in my life these days, for I had left their peaceful majesty when I was barely twenty, for the opportunities afforded me by the more prosperous flatlands. First I went to study law at the university in Chapel Hill, and, after a stint in the court system back home in Buncombe County, I set out for Washington to serve in Congress. Though I argued mightily against secession, I was forced to leave the U.S. government when North Carolina did, and, unable to prevent the War, I took my place among the fighting as colonel of the 26th North Carolina, a homegrown regiment. I had no particular military prowess, you understand. In those days, when the continent was trying to mount two armies from the remnants of one, anybody who could get five hundred men to sign up and serve under him was automatically made a colonel, for it was assumed that such a man could afford to buy his own horse and sword.

But the best fighting is politicking. I left the conflict in midstream to take up residence in the Governor’s Mansion in Raleigh, and from there, when the Confederacy fell, I found myself back in Washington, this time in a Union prison, along with the rest of the Confederate governors, as the victors seemed intent on collecting the whole set.

A year ago last July, they set me free again, and I took the train back to North Carolina, forbidden to hold political office yet awhile, for, in remaining loyal to my home state, I had rendered myself a traitor to the greater Union. Thus barred from politicking, I was forced to fall back on my original profession—the practice of law, although I had done none of it in a decade, and I doubted that I had either the experience or the inclination to make much headway with it. Still, a man must live, and it was tolerably honest work—well, as much so as being a Congressman is, I reckon.

The Wilkes County jail, that squat brick building set behind the courthouse, is rather dark inside, and, after the corridors of the Governor’s Mansion, it might have struck me as a bit low and cramped, but for my recent stay in similar accommodations in what was again our nation’s capital.

“We have much in common,” I told the prisoner.

He sat before me, gaunt, shaggy-haired, and scowling, rubbing at the iron shackles on his wrists, for they had chafed his skin. He gave me an appraising stare with those cold blue eyes, and I wondered if I was looking into the soul of a killer, but I had taken him on as a client, and so, unless he admitted it himself, I must believe him innocent. I wonder, though. When the War came, we took beardless boys out of the cabins, and sent them into the depths of hell, in places like Antietam and the Wilderness, and some of them came back changed. Once a dog has killed a chicken, you might as well shoot him, for you can never trust him again.

I was against the War from the beginning, and only incidentally because North Carolina’s secession would cost me my seat in Congress. When the Tarheels left the Union, I was on the stump, in my hometown of Mars Hill, orating mightily in favor of staying out of the Confederacy. I had just raised my hand to heaven to emphasize my point when a little towheaded boy came running out of the telegraph office, calling out that Fort Sumter in South Carolina had been fired upon, and that President Lincoln was calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the insurrection: that is, to invade our sister state, which North Carolinians would never do. Slowly, I let my hand fall.

So those who were hell-bent on the War had got it, and as if we had not suffered destruction enough in the four years it lasted, I thought we might now be getting another kind of retribution. In a generation of young men, we sowed the seeds of violence, and violence we shall reap.

*   *   *

“I thank you for coming to see me,” said the prisoner, “but you know I warn’t in your regiment, Governor.”

“I’m relieved to hear it.”

He reddened a little, and nodded, thinking I meant that I would be ashamed to claim him as a comrade because of his current difficulty.

“It isn’t that,” I assured him. “I have heard that you were taken prisoner near Kinston at the end of the War, but I was long gone from there by then, so your troubles in ’65 cannot be charged to my scroll.”

“No. You was the Governor by then.”

“And I went to jail as well, you know. About the time the Union let you go, they started rounding up all the Southern governors, and so I did three months in a Washington prison, in the congenial company of Governor Letcher of Virginia.” I looked around at the bare room with its whitewashed walls and the rough-hewn pine table that separated me from the prisoner. “How does this prison measure up to your Yankee prison camp? It certainly puts me in mind of the one I was in up in Washington.”

He shrugged. “It is tolerable, sir. At least here I sleep inside out of the weather, and they do feed me. I miss the taste of whiskey, but that’s about all, I ain’t used to much in the way of finery, nohow. My mother is a widow woman, and our ridge land don’t amount to much. I reckon you know there’s no money to pay a lawyer.”

“I didn’t suppose that there was.”

“Yet you come all the way up here from Charlotte, anyhow?”

I smiled, hearing in his question another point of similarity between him and me. Mountain people do not like to feel themselves in anyone’s debt. Apparently, judging from my client’s troubled eyes, not even if his life depended on it. He had been at pains to make it clear to me that he had not served under me in the War, thus relieving me of a sense of obligation, and now he underscored the point that he could not pay my fee, so if I proceeded to act on his behalf, it was my own decision, and not for duty or for gain. I confess I liked him the better for his forthrightness.

In my younger days, when anybody did me a good turn, I would lie awake nights trying to figure a way to repay his kindness. Later, though, after I had married a member of the Burke County gentry, and became accustomed to the customs of civilization, I learned that obligations are the currency of polite society. You want people to be forever indebted to you for some favor or other, in case you should ever need their power or their influence to advance yourself. This system of influence peddling took some getting used to, but I got the hang of it soon enough. I had been studying rich people most of my life, and if I never got exactly to feeling like one, I reckon I could pass muster amongst them, but the proud independence of my fellow mountaineers still warmed my heart.

“You mustn’t feel beholden to me,” I assured the shaggy young man. “The money is not an issue. I am obliged for the chance to defend you. The government won’t let me run for political office yet, you know, so I must fall back on lawyering to earn my living, but, between the War and my time in Congress, I am years out of practice. So you are my test case, and I hope that you will also prove to be an advertisement of my skill as a defense attorney.”

He shrugged. “It’ll be uphill work then. They were dead set on hanging me afore they even knew for sure they had a corpse.”

I nodded. I knew as much from the briefing I had been given on the case by Captain Allison. “Feeling does seem to be running high against you. We will try to get the case tried in another county, where you may get a more impartial jury. And where I may get one as well. You know, Wilkes County was strong for the Union during the War. Twelve jurors from here might enjoy the chance to give the former Confederate governor one in the eye by convicting you.”

“So you want to move me?”

I nodded. “The legal term is a change of venue. I propose to get the case tried just over the line in Iredell County. I lived there after the fall of Raleigh, and I flatter myself that I am well known and liked in Statesville.”

“But you ain’t on trial, sir.”

I smiled. “Sometimes to a lawyer it can feel that way. Juries can be contrary. You can argue yourself blue in the face, and then see your man convicted because those fools in the box didn’t like the look of him. But never mind the politics of it. Let us begin with the facts. It would be best if you told me in your own words how you came to be in this jail, charged with this terrible crime.”

The cold blue eyes looked into mine, and he looked no more than a boy in his bewilderment. “On account of the women, I reckon,” he said at last. “The Bible says that Eve brought death into the world when she ate that apple, and I reckon females have been the death of us ever since.”

“And yet, it is a young woman who is the victim in this case, and it is you who are charged with being the serpent bringing death to her.”

*   *   *

He tried to make a gesture, but the shackles clanked, and he let his hand fall again to his side. “Laura Foster,” he said. “She didn’t count for much. Anybody will tell you that.”

I felt a chill when he said that. Did we in our war teach this mere boy that people’s lives were of no account? “That sentiment does you no credit,” I told him. “And it will not endear you to a jury. Also, it is not how the prosecution will argue it. Whatever this young woman was in life, death will have translated her into an angel of purity and radiance. Even people who knew her will begin to believe it.”

He scowled up at me, and the shackles clanked again. “That won’t make it true.”

“People believing it will make it true. That’s as close to truth as we get this side of heaven, son.”

I let him turn that over in his mind for a moment or two, and then I said, “Now I know that when the whispering started about you being responsible for this killing, you took off and went over into Tennessee, and that they caught you there and hauled you back. You do see, don’t you, that your flight across the state line will make people assume you are guilty?”

A smile flickered across his face. “Well, Governor, don’t you believe that, and I reckon it won’t be true.”

*   *   *

So it seems I have undertaken the defense of a boy soldier, who has no money and who cannot even be bothered to make protestations of innocence. I must be as stubborn as my opponents accuse me of being even to think of pursuing this. And yet I am bound to do it … though I cannot say what impels me. Is it a case of “There but for the grace of God go I?” I was once a poor mountain boy, with no powerful friends, and too proud to ask favors of anyone. But I don’t think I was so very like Thomas Dula, after all. The Lord Almighty may have smiled upon me, but it seems to me that He stood back and let me do most of the scut work of self-improvement all by myself.

I was born in 1832 in the mountains of Madison County, North Carolina, on a little mountain farm in Reems Creek, a few miles north of Asheville. The President then was Andrew Jackson, a dour backcountry fellow who had once practiced law one mountain and a state line over from there, in Jonesborough, Tennessee. I venture to say that my family’s hopes for me ran equally high, for I came of good stock, for all that we were hemmed in by mountains and far removed from the corridors of power.

David Vance, my father’s father, had fought with Washington at Brandywine, and froze with him at Valley Forge, before finishing up the War in his native South, alongside Colonel Sevier at the Battle of King’s Mountain. I reckon he enjoyed that skirmish more than he did the big battles up in Pennsylvania. I would have.

At King’s Mountain those volunteer soldiers, mountain farmers who marched from Tennessee and the hills of Carolina to face down the Redcoats on the South Carolina border, were a sight more successful than General Washington’s Continental Army up north. They beat the British in an hour, and walked back home to finish the harvest. So my people were mountain farmers, but they also had education and friends in high places, and they had seen more of the world than the other side of Reems Creek. After the War, my grandfather served in North Carolina’s General Assembly, so perhaps the disease of politicking was a hereditary one in my case, but the love of learning was instilled in me at my mother’s knee. When my grandfather died, he left a library of five hundred volumes, and my mother put it to good use in the evenings, gathering us children around the hearth, and reading to us, from Shakespeare, the Bible, the commentary of Julius Caesar. These nightly sessions with the classics taught me grammar and oratory, providing me with a wellspring of fine words that I could draw from in later life in my speeches in the courtroom or on the hustings.

When I was six, they sent me and my brother Robert over to Flat Creek, seven miles from home, to board with “Uncle Miah,” Nehemiah Blackstock, who was a friend of my grandfather, and, like him, a surveyor. He was also a stern Presbyterian, same as the Vances were, and he brooked no disobedience. Like the recording angel, he kept a list of our failings in his black book, which he would consult when deciding what punishment should be meted out to the young sinners in his care. Many’s the time I had been judged and found wanting by Uncle Miah, and he made sure I grew up to be a good and learned man, or else a careful one. But it was thanks to him and the other determined adults who had charge of me in my youth that I got an education and made a lawyer, instead of sitting in a cell like poor Dula.